For the first time in Germany, the Sophiensæle will bring together international works by queer disabled artists as part of the performance festival Queering the Crip, Cripping the Queer from September 9th to 17th 2022 – with all the challenges and potentials that the intersections of disability and queerness entail.
Image above: Quiplash © Christopher Andreou
The festival takes place in cooperation with the Schwule Museum, which presents the exhibition of the same name from September 1st to January 30th 2023 and also dedicates it for the first time to the historical, activist and cultural intersection of queerness and disability in art. But it is not only the title and theme that connect the Sophiensæle and the Gay Museum in September: works by Quiplash, Anajara Amarante, Pelenakeke Brown and Sindri Runudde are represented in both the festival and the exhibition.
The performance festival Queering the Crip, Cripping the Queer is an invitation to art practice and discourse around disabled queer (over)life and work. The invited artists not only test and cripple heteronormativity and gender performances, but also queer cultural practices such as drag. QUIPLASH, for example, bring a dazzling drag show to the stage with their cast of blind performers, while SINDRI RUNUDDE invites us on a sensory journey into the intimacy of voice messages. Two productions will premiere at the festival: PELENAKEKE BROWN‘s work explores indigenous concepts of time and space from a crip-queer perspective, and ANAJARA AMARANTE takes us on a queer version of South American surrealism. The programme will be rounded off with a workshop on queer audio description and a panel.
Once swear words, today carefully chosen, the terms queer and crip are emancipatory self-descriptions of many artists to describe their life and art practice. Both terms refer to the ongoing history of social exclusion – not only, but especially in Germany, a country where disabled and queer life was persecuted during National Socialism. Similar to queering, cripping describes subversive practices: These aim to make social as well as cultural norms (especially non-disability as a supposed normal state) visible and to expose exclusion mechanisms.
Curated from a disabled queer perspective by Noa Winter, Queering the Crip, Cripping the Queer gives a shared space to these practices, aesthetics and histories of joy and suffering, of passion and sexuality, of exclusion and community in the present.
The Schwulen Museum‘s exhibition Queering the Crip, Cripping the Queer challenges the fantasy of the ideal body with artworks by 24 international contemporary artists. The artworks are juxtaposed with historical objects and exhibition texts, opening up an interplay of creative freedom and thematic reappraisal of disabled and queer history.
WITH Anajara Amarante, Pelenakeke Brown, Sindri Runudde, Quiplash a.o. CURATION Noa Winter
The festival is a production of SOPHIENSÆLE. Supported by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe – open funding. In cooperation with the Schwulen Museum Berlin.
WHEN?
Friday, 9 September to Saturday, 17 September 2022
WHERE?
SOPHIENSÆLE
Sophienstraße 18
10178 Berlin-Mitte
sophiensaele.com
